Beginning training with 8.5 week old puppy

In this video, Romeo is 8.5 weeks old. We brought him home just a couple of days before he was 8 weeks old, so in this video he has been in our home for just under one week.

He is working for his lunch here, and earns his entire lunch by working for it. He is learning to OFFER me behaviors that I like.

So far he is learning that sit, down and eye contact pay well.

Whining, jumping and being pushy do not.

You can see from less than a week of training, that he is learning quickly. I have not put anything on cue yet.

In this video we are just starting to work on his name for the first time as well.

You can see that he does get frustrated sometimes (as noted by his whining and the occasional jumping) but he recovers quickly and gets back on task.

Part of this training is to help him learn how to deal with frustration so that he learns quickly temper tantrums never get you what you want.

You can also see that for most of the session, our 7 year old Greyhound was present as well. Normally, we recommend training puppies separately from other household dogs to start to reduce distractions. But since our Greyhound was so well trained, you can see she is very patient and provides some extra distraction for Romeo to learn to ignore and focus on me.

When most people train their dogs&comma; they expect their dogs to respond to verbal cues&comma; hand signals or both&period; However&comma; there are times when an automatic or default behavior is better&period; What is an automatic or default behavior&quest; This is a behavior the dog is expected to perform in certain situations witho&period;&period;&period;